Fxlauncher 1 is a auto updating launcher for javafx programs

Question

Fxlauncher 1 is a auto updating launcher for javafx programs Download a small jar around 18Kb start it and it will download the actual application and run it Every time you start the small jar it will check if there is a newer version and download it automatically So fxlauncher is a fun project and it will make keeping a desktop application uptodate easy Setting up fxlauncher from Maven was not so easy A plugin was needed requirements The plugin needs to do the following 1 create the `app xml` that is used to describe the application its dependencies and several settings 2 update `fxlauncher jar` with app xml 3 copy all the dependencies to a directory from where it can later be uploaded to a webserver 4 upload to a webserver All these tasks can be done without writing a plugin for it and was how it was done untill now this means several calls using the `maven exec plugin` The setup was huge I will not go into details about all of them but I do want to highlight some interesting things I found while writing this Maven plugin documentation is bad Subject says it all I did not expect the documentation to be this bad In the end I analyzed several well known plugins the dependency plugin the shade plugin and the jgitflow plugin to see how a maven plugin project is supposed to be setup There is an archetype for it but I could not get that one to work See pom xml 2 for how I set it java nio file FileSystem is cool To manipulate the fxlauncher jar I decided to use the FileSystem 3 that was introduced in Java7 This makes it very easy to add or delete files to in this case a jar file ~~~java void addtoLauncher String fileToAdd throws MojoExecutionException getLog info String format placing s in fxlauncher fileToAdd Path path = Paths get String format s fxlauncher jar buildDir Map lt String String gt props = new HashMap lt gt props put create false URI uri = URI create jar + path toUri toASCIIString try FileSystem jarFile = FileSystems newFileSystem uri props Path source = Paths get fileToAdd Path target = jarFile getPath String valueOf source getFileName Files copy source target StandardCopyOption REPLACE EXISTING catch IOException e throw new MojoExecutionException error in adding file to jar e ~~~ The heavy lifting is done in the `try` block There are several types of files you can open this way mojo executor 4 is cool too Normally when you want to copy dependencies to a certain place you will setup the maven dependency plugin to do the heavy lifting for you You would configure it in your pom xml and tie it to a phase I wanted however to be able to call the maven dependency plugin from another plugin Luckily this is possible with the mojo executor ~~~java void copyDependencies throws MojoExecutionException IOException getLog info copying to + buildDir executeMojo plugin groupId org apache maven plugins artifactId maven dependency plugin version 2 0 goal copy dependencies configuration element name outputDirectory buildDir executionEnvironment project session buildPluginManager ~~~ It doesn t get much easier then this I like the fluent like api 1 2 3 4